[ih] AOL in perspective

[John Day]

In the very early days, the NMC at UCLA did something similar. If you connected to a particular well-known socket, it would print a ASCII map of the current ARPANET and which hosts were up or down. It was discontinued when it would no longer fit on one page.

Take care,
John

> On Sep 4, 2025, at 10:42, Lars Brinkhoff via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Speaking of.  Marc Seriff was one of the co-founders of AOL.  He had
> previously been part of the MIT Dynamic Modeling group.  He (along with
> Bob Metcalfe and others) had a hand in making the ARPANET "SURVEY"
> program, which would probe network hosts to see if they were up.  Marc
> told me this:
> 
>  "I tell the story of SURVEY all the time.  For a few days, the whole
>  ARPANET was pissed at me since, in those days, all the systems logged
>  every connection attempt - typically to a model 33 teletype machine
>  sitting in front of the PDP/10 or whatever.  A decent system since the
>  few computers on the network at the time weren't likely to get more
>  than a few connections a day.  All of sudden, I'm poking them once a
>  minute or so.  System managers would come in in the morning to find
>  paper piled behind the teletype and, frequently, ink ribbons that had
>  been torn to shreds!"
> 
> They program has been recovered and seems to be working, lacking only an
> ARPANET to survey.  Watch your teletypes!
> 
> Survey results were stored on the Datacomputer (also located in MIT's
> Tech Sq building.)
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